JOSEPH
NEEDHAM will be remembered for his massive achievement embodied in the
continuing Science and Civilisation in China
series, the successive parts of which have been published by Cambridge University Press since
1954. This great work is planned as a history of science, technology
and medicine in China, seen in its fullest social and intellectual
context, and illuminated by a deep and sympathetic understanding of the
cultures of both East and West. Through his writings he has radically
changed the ways in which scholars and scientists evaluate both the
history of Chinese culture, and the history of science medicine and
technology understood as part of the common cultural heritage of the
human race. He was undoubtedly the greatest Western sinologist of this
century, and is probably the British historian best-known on a world
scale. He has rightly been called "the Erasmus of the twentieth
century".

HE
WAS BORN on December 9, 1900, as the only son of a Harley Street
physician and a musically talented mother. After attending Oundle
School he went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and read
biochemistry. Caius College was to remain his academic home for the
rest of his life; he was successively a research fellow, tutor, fellow
and finally (1966-76) Master. For most of the first half of his life
Needham was engaged in establishing himself as a chemical embryologist
of distinction. The major works of this period are his Chemical
Embryology (1931) and Biology and Morphogenesis (1942). But by the time
this second book appeared he was already moving in the direction which
was to lead him towards his life's work.

IN
THE MID 1930's he met three young Chinese researchers who had come to
work in Cambridge. The interest these bright young people aroused moved
him to begin learning Chinese, and when war broke out in Europe and the
East it was this connection that led him to propose that he should be
commissioned to establish a Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in
Chongqing, to where the Chinese government had withdrawn in the face of
the Japanese onslaught. During this time he was ideally placed to study
what had been accomplished by the Chinese people in the field of
science and technology over their long history. What he began to learn
astonished him. It became clear (for instance) that printing, the
magnetic compass and gunpowder weapons were all Chinese in origin,
despite the puzzlement that Francis Bacon had expressed over their
beginnings when in the seventeenth century he pointed to "the force and
virtue and consequences of discoveries" (Novum Organon, Book 1,
aphorism 129).

AFTER
THE WAR he worked with UNESCO in Paris for a while, but on his return
to Cambridge he had already planned the years of work that lay ahead.
He set out to answer a question that had been presenting itself to him
ever more clearly for some time: why was it that despite the immense
achievements of traditional China it had been in Europe and not in
China that the scientific and industrial revolutions occurred? He
approached Cambridge University Press with a proposal for a one-volume
treatment of this subject, which they accepted, but as time went by
this plan swelled to seven volumes, the fourth of which had to be split
into three parts - and so it went on. Twenty-four parts in all have so
far been published, and more are still on the way.

MOST
OF THE EARLIER volumes were written in their entirety by Needham
himself, but as time went by he gathered an international team of
collaborators, to whom the completion of the project is now entrusted.
As the project has broadened, so has the range of questions under
investigation. It is now clear that no simple answer to Needham's
original question will be possible. The quest has opened out into an
investigation of the ways in which scientific and technical activity
have been linked with the development of Chinese society over the last
four millennia.